Rostov-on-Don, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation
Rostov-on-Don, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation
JEL A13 Relation of Economics to Social Values
JEL B50 General
VAK Russia 5.2.1
VAK Russia 5.2.5
UDC 330.163.11
The article proposes the construction of a political economy based on anthropological foundations distinct from those of liberalism, Marxism, and institutionalism. Challenging the axiom that human beings strive for freedom, the authors draw on the traditions of philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and social psychology (B. Pascal, F.M. Dostoevsky, A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche, S. Freud, E. Fromm, J. Lacan, S. Milgram, P. Zimbardo, T. Adorno, G. Agamben), which substantiate the thesis that submission is embedded in the structure of subjectivity, operates unconsciously, and leads human beings to actively avoid freedom. From this, an alternative anthropological axiom is derived: human beings are unfree by nature; submission constitutes their instinct. The economy is defined not as a sphere of production or a space for the realization of freedom, but as a system for organizing submission into stable, reproducible forms. Legitimation serves as the key mechanism that transforms the instinct of submission into a socially acceptable and institutionally entrenched relation. The costs of legitimation-material, symbolic, psychological, and institutional-serve as criteria for distinguishing historical regimes of submission. Capitalism is characterized as a form in which legitimation acquires the character of a self-liquidating commodity, while its costs are shifted onto the subject of submission itself. On the basis of this proposed ontology, the fundamental categories of political economy-commodity, money, labor, capital, surplus value, crisis, rent-are reinterpreted. The heuristic potential of the model is demonstrated through phenomena that remain problematic for classical approaches: wage differentiation, globalization, the ecological crisis, and the digital economy. The study is theoretical in nature and outlines directions for the subsequent empirical operationalization of the proposed categories.
political economy, ontology, unfreedom, submission, legitimation, costs of legitimation, capitalism, instinct of submission
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